TO THE READERS.

—receive only the ideas or images of these things, or rather, they even manufacture them. I have shown that this is the faculty of human Reason, which for that reason, along with its acts and exercise, I have called active: but those [other faculties] are passive, as they do not produce their own objects or their living outpourings original: influvia; see previous page note on the flow of divine energy, but rather experience and receive them.

    In relation to spiritual Objects, such passive faculties are a certain inward and even immense hunger or desire of the soul, and likewise the passive intellect intellectus paſſivus; the capacity of the mind to receive truth directly from God rather than working it out through logic, the eye of the spiritual soul (in which the seat of faith is). Furthermore, there are many more spiritual senses in the innermost parts of a person, which are fit to be affected by God, by divine things, and by their flowings-out original: effluentiis in a real, living, and solid way.

    By contrast, a soul affected only by the ideas of Reason is affected superficially, in a shadowy way, and in a manner that is dead, vanishing, and entirely like a mere painting; for the ideas themselves are only certain dead and sterile pictures, and utterly fleeting. Now, if anyone brings to the reading of mystical subjects original: rerum myſticarum only the ideal and shadowy faculty of their own Reason, and by reading through their active intellect—